Cameras for live streaming and church studios have gone cinematic
Thanks to church livestreams like Bethel Redding and UpperRoom pushing creative boundaries, production leaders have felt licensed to reach outside the traditional broadcast box for compositions and frame rates that are more familiar to music videos and movies than something you might see on TBN. We talked a little bit about those cinematic livestreams in the July issue, so go have a look if you’d like some examples.
But for many of us, getting that cinematic shot has been a little out of reach due to our hardware—cinematic cameras have been unbelievably expensive until the last five or six years. And even though some non-cinematic manufacturers were finding footholds in the cinematic space, the price points only dropped from unbelievable to “ouch.”
If your church is ready to step up from an older camcorder or DSLR, now is a great time…
But not anymore. Consumer camera manufacturers have caught up with cinema cameras (mostly—ARRI images are always going to look insane), and the price points are in reach of many churches looking to up their livestream game.
But first…
What makes a cinema camera a cinema camera?
For real though, what’s the big deal? An image is an image, right?
That’s a joke. If you’ve spent time in video production at all, you’ve certainly noticed your Best Buy-level or insert-other-consumer-brand DSLR/mirrorless video camera image doesn’t have that same “zing” you see on TV shows or movies. Well, here’s why:
Sensor Size
Film cameras utilize full frame and other large format sensors to capture the highest quality image possible. Most budget consumer video cameras use small sensor sizes, which we broke down for you a while back in a deep dive article. Even if you have 6K resolution, if it’s on a micro 4/3 sensor it just won’t look as crisp as the same resolution on a bigger sensor.
Dynamic Range
Cambridge in Colour properly describes dynamic range as a camera’s “ratio between the maximum and minimum measurable light intensities (white and black, respectively).” In layman's terms, that means how well a camera can reproduce light or dark with detail when set to its native ISO. Let’s say someone is standing in a room in front of a window with no other lights on and it’s sunny outside. A camera with a lower dynamic range will not be able to expose details outside the window and the detail of the person or other things inside the room. You’ll be able to see the details outside the window but everything in the room will be too dark, or the person will be properly exposed but everything outside will be blown out and just appear white. A camera with high dynamic range will be able to properly expose everything inside and outside, or at least do so with as little help as possible from fill light.
Cinema cameras have high dynamic range, expressed in stops. Most consumer-grade camera specs don’t even mention dynamic range.
High-quality digital imagery is no longer just for movie studios with big budgets
A Couple Other Things
Cinema cameras also offer better color options by allowing you to shoot in raw, log, or other proprietary file formats that give directors lots of data for color grading. You also get higher bit depths, with cinema cameras getting up to 16-bit.
Anyway, enough nerdy stuff. What are some models you might want to look at? Read on.
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Blackmagic Design Pyxis 6K (Street price of under $3,000)
I’m not going to say that BMD was taking a shot at the Sony FX6 with this new cinema camera, but it sure looks a lot like a Sony FX6 for half the price. No, it does not have the same dynamic range as the FX6, coming in at just 13 stops, but a full-frame sensor along with all the bells and whistles that make cinema camera so much fun to work with—it’s an excellent value proposition for any church looking to seriously step up their film or streaming game.
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Canon R5-C (Street Price of under $3,400)
We all loved the C100, but there’s a new workhorse in town. We’ll start with internal 8k60p RAW recording. That alone should be enough (provided you have an SD card up to the task), but of course, Canon does what Canon does, and this little camera will easily switch over to stills (45MP on a full frame, CMOS sensor) with the flip of an actual switch, which is Canon’s value proposition here—why need a camera for photography and then a camera for cinematography when you can have one camera that does it all? They also put a timecode in/out on there alongside a mini HDMI for video out. Now, just one video out does mean you’ll have to jerry-rig this a bit if you want to use it for streaming, but if you’d like to buy one or two cameras that will do it all, this is that camera.\
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Fujifilm X-H2S (Street price of under $2,500)
We’ve spent some serious time with this camera here at Church Production. Now, technically, it’s not marketed as a cinema camera, but gosh-darn, it’s got great dynamic range (14 stops) and a respectable APS-C sensor, that, while not as big as the aforementioned full-frames, is still sizeable and boasts 26 megapixels. Oh, and Fuji threw it some fun AI so that the camera is smart and trains its own auto-focus to work better.
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Panasonic Lumix BS1H (Street price of under $2,500)
Guys and gals, this is the real deal. You’re getting a cinema box camera (alarmingly similar to a camera we’ll talk about below) with all the bells and whistles—SDI out, HDMI out, power-over-ethernet (PoE), full-frame sensor, 14 stops of dynamic range, and 60p4k—in a compact chassis that offers endless possibilities with a SmallRig glow-up. It’s a darn-near unbeatable value.
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Red Komodo (Street Price of under $5,000)
The key to this camera is its reputation, which the aforementioned Lumix is trying to unseat. The Komodo is the standby for budget-conscious, indy filmmakers who need images that will hold up against ARRIs and their counterparts. Reds are just as comfortable on Hollywood sets and music video shoots as they are in sanctuaries and church studios. Bethel Production is (was?) cool with them for their broadcast set up, and if I remember right, our friend Luke Manwaring over at Bethel Music used them to capture the “Come Up Here” live album recording. REDs are real-deal cinema cameras, and you pay a little more for that reputation and reliability, but you won’t be disappointed. You will have to get creative with video outputs if you’re using them for your live stream because there’s just one SDI out and nothing else, but Bethel Production guides you through that in the above link.
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Sony Alpha FX3
The Alpha FX3 (Street price of under $4,000) is just plain remarkable. It’s just a tick bigger than a baseball while featuring a full-frame sensor and mirrorless convenience. Again, if you’re on a budget, used glass is your friend here, and there will be lots of options with the E-mount functionality. And they advertise it to have 15 stops of dynamic range.
Sony Alpha Cinema Line FX6
It’s big brother, the FX6 (Street price of under $6,000) gets you into some serious camera territory with 16-bit 12G SDI hardware for 4k capture or broadcast feeds. It has the same big sensor as the FX3 along with the same dynamic range, but it’s still unbelievably small. It’s double the price of its little brother, but it’s worth every penny.
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Final Thoughts
High-quality digital imagery is no longer just for movie studios with big budgets. Honestly, it’s kind of nuts to consider how far cameras have come in the last decade. If your church is ready to step up from camcorders, consumer mirrorless cameras, or even older DSLRs, now is a great time to find wildly good cameras for not that much money.
